This post was first published on my newsletter, Delightful

A few weeks back I was hired to help an organization develop a new value proposition.

A value proposition, you may be aware, is the benefit a company promises to deliver to customers who buy their products or services.

We do X for Y because we believe Z.

It’s just a sentence.

We make innovative and user-friendly products that enrich people’s lives. That’s Apple.

We provide the smartest way for people to get around. That’s Uber.

We provide the world’s most responsible AI model that won’t answer anything that could possibly be construed as problematic or offensive because people are fragile and lawyers get paid hourly. That’s Goody-2.

And that’s a joke.

But you get the point.

A value prop is a utility poem. It’s the most concise way to explain what you do, and who you do it for, and why that’s important.

Accordingly, a lot of hand-wringing and temple-pressing and shoulder-massaging goes into developing that one sentence, because that one sentence contains so many complex notions.

And each of those notions (product, customers, meaning)👆🏼are actually decisions that take an awful long time for groups of people to make.

For example. When we created InsideHook, a lifestyle guide for successful men, it took us months to describe ourselves as “the newsletter for adventurous and discerning men who have plenty of money but not enough time.” In that case we knew who we wanted to reach (high net worth men) but we didn’t know what would be most valuable to them. Turns out they wanted to do as many interesting things as possible in the limited free time they had.

When we were creating Upwise, a personal finance app for MetLife that helps users create better money habits, it took months to arrive at “The personal finance app that helps you create better financial habits so you can increase your money mood”. In that case, we knew we wanted to help people create habits (instead of simply managing a budget), but we had to do research to understand how anxious everyone was about money. So it took some time to land on “money mood”.

In other words, it’s a hard thing to write!

It’s especially hard because of this one, simple, nagging problem: You have to tell your story to yourself before you can tell it to your customers.

That is, you have to do the messy, therapeutic work of deciding who your company is and what your company does before you can create a pithy little sentence that eager students read in the Harvard Business Review.

Everybody wants to skip to just writing the thing!

But that’s like skipping to, I dunno, writing a novel without, like, having an idea for the novel first.

That’s why I like to use an interactive whiteboard to help clients develop their value proposition. You can download it by clicking here.

This whiteboard is one of my favorites.

I created it in Canva to be used by remote teams over Zoom, since I’m rarely on site with a client.

It uses the Strategyzer Value Proposition Design framework, which helps you to create value propositions that you can iterate on and test.

For my money, it’s the “iterate and test” part that’s most important.

The most frustrating aspect of creating a value proposition internally is that unstructured conversations about <finger quotes> “who we are” and “who is our customer” can go on for hours without a clear decision being made. Usually what happens is everybody gets flustered or annoyed, and then some marketing guy just writes some copy on the web site, and everybody pretends like the conversations never happened.

Better idea: use this framework to create a structure for your conversations and your outputs. Once you begin using the Mad Lib-style design, you’ll be able to recognize the patterns of a good value prop.

Maybe you’re not describing the customer correctly. Maybe you’re not being precise about the jobs to be done. In either case, just swap those components out.

It’s like paint by numbers that way.

Hope this all makes sense.

For best results, download Strategyzer’s value prop design book and have a read. Then, use the whiteboard to lead your team (or your client) through the exercise.

Good luck!

p.s., there are many, many versions of the Strategyzer framework available online, including on Figma, if that’s your jam.

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